Hard to say, not knowing. Fascist Italy was a crumby place for physicists anyway, and once the war was going, it only got worse. Fermi made huge discoveries in terms of the technologies used in the atom bombs used in WWII, so, I think it's fair to say that, if Fermi had not been born, nuclear science would not have followed the same timeline.

I was thinking if he had stayed in Italy his discoveries could have hurt instead of helped us.

bostjan64

Maybe, but Mussolini was not Hitler. I don't think Mussolini ever saw the potential for contemporary science to enter warfare at any level near what the Germans, Americans, and Japan attempted. Italy during WWII was still using balloons and biplanes when everyone else was working on jet propulsion and rockets. It's likely Fermi would have just been stonewalled and had his funding spent on more Carcano rifles for the infantry.

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